


Birth Certificate

by alright_evans



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Broken nose, Broom Cupboards, Christmas, Diagon Alley, F/M, Hogwarts, I'm telling you, Multi, Pregnant, Quidditch, The Burrow, common room parties, festive scenes, flying car, halloween party, it was your classic best man-maid of honour situation, it's got all the best of all 7 books
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:20:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29763003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alright_evans/pseuds/alright_evans
Summary: What's to follow, in 151 words:"I’m easily pleased, I’m usually first on this train for the beginning of term, but first off it as well. Perhaps what I’m saying is, I’ve never had a real problem in my life."*"It was an enchanted pregnancy test (with a startling percentage for accuracy). If I could have used my wand, I wouldn’t have had to wait five minutes for it to do the enchantment on its own, but if the Ministry came for me now, I’d have to tell everyone why I’d been kicked out for underage magic: underage sex."*“How did this happen, Rose?” Mum asked finally, although I didn’t think it was the question she really wanted to be asking.“Oh, you know… the usual way.”“This isn’t the moment for jokes, Rose!” Dad cried out.“Sorry,” I replied, not having much else to say, because it really wasn’t the time for jokes.*
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Scorpius Malfoy/Rose Weasley
Comments: 1
Kudos: 27





	1. Death Eater Cards and Pregnancy Tests

**Author's Note:**

> this has been rattling around my brain for the best part of ten years and now I've got loads of time on my hands so I'd like it done! I really just want it out of my head and into the world so I can be someone who finishes something, for once. there is a very slim chance you came across it in another lifetime, under a different title and with no regard for pacing or subtlety, but rest assured I have rewritten every single word that I wrote ten years ago, keeping only the ideas of the best jokes.

I’ve always been a fan of the platform reunion. The Christmas holiday, in particular, is just one long good time, from the last lesson in the last week, through to the Common Room party, to the hungover breakfast the morning of the train. For me, the fun doesn’t even end – all my red-haired cousins crammed into the same compartment, James threatening everyone who knows about the things he got up to that he hasn’t told his parents and thinks he might get away with. Of all the people I’ve spent every waking moment with in the last three months, I only have to say goodbye to a small handful, because the rest are guaranteed to get into cars around me and make the same, long drive from London to Devon, to the Burrow, to three weeks of celebrating and arguing and cramming three people into the same bed to make sure everyone has somewhere to sleep, mountains of vegetables to peel and presents to wrap, bad carol singing and snowball fights. I’m easily pleased, I’m usually first on this train for the beginning of term, but first off it as well. Perhaps what I’m saying is, I’ve never had a real problem in my life.

Here, December 2023, there proves to be a first time for everything. I’m in hiding in an empty compartment, behind the curtain, fifteen minutes after we pulled into Kings’ Cross. I accidentally slept with the son of Dad’s least favourite person in the entire world, Lord Voldemort included, and I’m finding this whole ‘getting off the train’ thing overrated, to be honest. Well, I don’t know, I haven’t even tried it yet. I’m sitting exactly where I was when it left at eleven o’clock this morning, my suitcase in the rack above my head, with an ‘I’m way to cool for school’ expression – or at least, that’s what I’m hoping will be reported back to dad. Actually, I’d never consider myself too cool for Hogwarts. Hogwarts is way cooler than me.

I digress. I really need to get over myself at some point, ideally within the next two minutes, and go home. Although, let’s consider my options here – there are definitely worse trains to be stuck on. There was that muggle one in that book where that guy got stabbed seven times, and then that film that Teddy loved, where the world froze and everyone was stuck on the train forever, some kind of allegory for the muggle class war that we’d learnt about in fourth year. Frankly, I seem to be fully equipped for a nice life on the Hogwarts Express. There’s that lovely woman who comes round with the food trolley – and maybe I’ll even learn her name – so I’d be perfectly well nourished. My trunk is full of all of my stuff; I could get dressed every day, and read a bit, and write my holiday essays. I figure it’s only the next three weeks that I have to entertain myself for, until everyone comes back, piles into this compartment and tells me how much they missed me over Christmas.

I pulled the curtain back an inch to check the situation on the platform. Dad was still standing there impatiently, checking his watch, like he had been last time I looked. He was not a man who liked to wait for things, especially when those things were as mundane as his eldest daughter refusing to get off the Hogwarts Express. James was saying something to Al and I could just tell by his face that it was intended to wind him up – and I could just tell by Dad’s face that he really didn’t have the patience for his favourite nephews to argue all the way back to the Burrow. I sighed. My not getting off the train was likely to be responsible for at least three arguments in the next few hours if I didn’t resign myself to going home. And besides, if it was just going to sit at Kings Cross all day for the next three weeks, I probably had a bit of time to decide whether permanently moving in was the best course of action. I stood up, hoping it wasn’t too late to pretend I had fallen asleep. I dragged my trunk off the rack, and accidentally dropped it on the floor, wincing at the loud _smash_ inside. I wheeled it out of the compartment and appeared in the doorway, beaming forcefully.

“Only me!” I announced.

“Well yeah, only you left on the entire train!” Al pointed out, just as Dad started to ask where I’d been. “Even the woman who pushes the trolley got off five minutes ago.”

“I fell asleep,” I replied lamely, recognising that all the people who knew I hadn’t been asleep were standing on the platform right in front of me, and Al was looking incredibly sceptical. Dad nodded in disbelief, but fortunately Hugo started to whine before he could say anything.

  
“Rose is here now; can we go home? Louis took my Death Eater cards and I need to get them off him before he trades them with Alfie Thomas!”

Dad gave Hugo a weird look. “Hugh, I’ve told you what I think about those cards,” he reminded him. “But yeah, we’ve been in London longer than is good for anyone, let’s get back.” He caught my arm and my heart sank. The entire sordid tale was going to come out before the end of the holiday, I could just tell.

“Rosie.” I watched Al stop to listen, but a quick glance from Dad moved him on. “What’s up with you? You’ve never been last off the Hogwarts Express in your entire life, it’s like getting off the train is a race and you’re the only person who knows about it. And you look really shifty.”

I shook him off brightly. “Nothing. I was asleep, I told you! And then I thought I’d lost something, so I had to unpack my whole trunk to check that I hadn’t left it when I moved compartments, and –” He evidently wasn’t buying it, and I wasn’t sure I blamed him. “I’ll see you in the car!” I continued, hurrying through the barrier, where Al was waiting on Platform 9 interrogate me. I pretended I hadn’t seen him, and caught up with Lily to ask her about Lorcan Scamander, who had made a conscious effort to come and have breakfast with her this morning, and she hadn’t been sitting with us on the journey home so I had figured they might have been having a long, emotional goodbye. When he got into the car, Dad had the air of a man who regretted ever becoming a parent and having to pick his children up from school.

*

Not soon enough, we pulled up outside the Burrow. Al and James had had an argument that started with Quidditch and ended with “I _swear_ I didn’t know you liked her, ok?!”, and the entire car was subdued. Dad actually seemed angry, probably with me, but also maybe with the Potter boys because in the middle of their argument he’d become distracted and swerved into a dustbin, so now there was a dent in his car. Hugo was moody because he hated it when the adults in his life pulled rank about his fascination with commercial post-war merchandise, and reminded him that the dark arts weren’t a joke. Lily was now fed up because James had accidentally given her a black eye when he was trying to force Al’s head out of the window, which, amongst other things, “didn’t match her Christmas jumper”. Al wasn’t speaking to James on account of James having kissed Eliza Bones a couple of weeks ago. I felt a little nauseous, which I’d put down to travelling and also the weight of all the regret I was carrying. James was pissed off because Al had confessed to being the one to rip his Cannons robes the other day. The tension in the car was tangible.

I got out quickly and hurried into the house, leaving Dad with mine and Hugo’s trunks to drag into the house; retrospectively, I imagined that wouldn’t do anything for his mood. I was headed up to the bedroom that I shared with Dom. Those of us who couldn’t apparate home on a whim would spend just about the whole holiday in Ottery St. Catchpole, since Nana would probably forbid us from leaving anyway, banging on about how Al needed feeding up or detaining everyone with a peeler and a mound of vegetables. Mum and Dad would probably be back and forth between here and home a bit, and our plans were to spend Christmas Eve at Grimmauld Place, but the pull of Christmas at the Burrow always drew absolutely everyone in, and no one, not even Uncle Percy, could bear to spend really any time away from it.

Dom and I had demanded the top floor with some misguided view that we’d always have important things to discuss, which was hardly true at the best of times, and anyway we spent nearly every single moment of the day together at school, so it was hard to imagine what we might possibly still have to share when we got home (other people’s gossip, it turned out; I had stored away all the details of the Eliza Bones story, because I knew she’d want them). Having the top bedroom had all the perks that an attic could have – creaky floorboards, cobwebs, a view of the old Lovegood family home, if you really squinted, and reams and reams of magical fairy lights – but in a family as large as mine, getting up there alone without being intercepted by someone was nigh on impossible.

"Alright Rosie Posie, weren’t you going to come and say hello? Where are you racing off to?" Teddy asked cheerfully, coming out from Victoire’s bedroom. I had learnt to treat this as if it was normal, even though it seemed like Uncle Bill still hadn’t realised that Teddy didn’t sleep on the floor in the same room as Al, James and Fred anymore.

"I was going to my room," I smiled ruefully.

"And now?" he asked, angling for something.

"Well, I suppose you’ve stopped me."

"Well, maybe – I haven’t seen you in months!”

“Yeah, that’s true. Best couple of months of my life, I’d say.”

He grinned. “Bullshit, Weasley, and you know it. Anyway, how have you been? Any news?”

I lied like my dad, which was to say: badly. I clammed up as soon as Teddy asked.

“You got something on your mind, Granger?" Teddy asked, suddenly sounding concerned (Mum’s maiden name was just about the only way to distinguish me from my ten cousins who mostly looked exactly like me, from behind, in a knitted Weasley sweater). "Want to talk about it?"  
No, obviously, absolutely not Rose, you couldn’t lie to Teddy – or anyone – if your life depended on it, this could only end badly – “yeah, ok. Can we go outside?”

"Yeah, of course. Lead the way.”

Distractedly, I took Teddy out of the back door and down to the bottom of the garden where the forest began. The whole time I was thinking of getting someone to drive me back to London so I could relocate to the train – I wasn’t sure who I’d be able to find who would do it without asking questions, but I’d forgotten just how oppressive this house could be. At the best of times, which was most of the time, it was just loud and you didn’t really get any time to yourself, but at the worst of times – well it seemed a lot like I was about to tell Teddy exactly what had happened, and I’d only been home for fifteen minutes. I’d been able to keep this to myself for nearly two months at Hogwarts, surrounded by nearly all the same people, no less.

"So Rose, what's the problem?" he asked seriously, sitting down on a tree stump.

I could hardly keep still, walking around him nervously. "Well, I mean, it’s nothing… I mean – yeah. Well, the thing is, Teddy... I – I, uh I sort of... Might have I mean… Look, Teddy, I think I... I-slept-with-Scorpius-Malfoy," I said, quickly, as if that somehow made it less real.

It didn’t seem to land straight away because he continued to sort of smile at me. “You think?” he asked lightly, like there was something to unpack in the subjunctive.

"No,” I replied slowly. “No, in fact I do actually know that it happened.”

As this registered, his face seemed to drain of all the colour. "Rose..." he began, trailing off. He looked so shocked that I had to look away. He was twenty-five and it was hard to imagine anything that could shock him – there didn’t seem to be anything he hadn’t done. Teddy had grown up with the laxest parenting team in the world, a fragile, doting grandmother and Uncle Harry with a lot to prove about family. He got all of the best of both of them; all of his grandmother’s kindness, and all of Uncle Harry’s fun, with none of his parenting style. Back when I had still thought that Teddy was Uncle Harry’s son (I had thought this for nearly ten years, and I was devastated for a number of reasons when I found out the truth, for Teddy, and for Harry, in fact), I had noticed how Teddy got away with absolutely everything while James had spent half his life on the naughty step. (This was a small invention of Uncle Harry’s, aided by a temporary sticking charm. He didn’t impose many rules on any of his kids, but James was, actually, an extremely cheeky child, and Uncle Harry had been treated to just about every kind of discipline in the world. His compromise was three minutes stuck to the bottom step, but usually this was followed by an ice cream because he could hardly bear to see his children upset with him. And Teddy’s upbringing was even chiller than that. When he was fifteen, Harry had taken him for his first drink in muggle London, with a borrowed ID and Teddy morphed into its appearance. He had claimed that his father, his godfather and Teddy’s father would never have forgiven him if he hadn’t).

I had shocked Teddy, who was unshockable. Eventually it seemed pertinent to apologise. This hardly seemed to have any effect.

"You… you don't need to apologise, Rose. What happened?" The colour was coming back to his face again.

"Oh, Teddy, it’s so _embarrassing,"_ I whined. I still hadn’t quite come to terms with everything, and actually, confessing it out loud didn’t seem to have made me feel anything but incredibly guilty.

"Rose, tell me," he replied firmly.

"Well, at the end of October James held a massive Halloween party."

"Right,” Teddy acknowledged. He looked how I felt: extremely uncomfortable and like he didn’t at all want to know how this ended.

"And I was – you know – drunk. Oh, Merlin. So I got talking to Malfoy. He was pretty drunk too, but I don’t know, a house elf with a butterbeer addiction would have seemed sober to me. Anyway, he seemed to be handling all his firewhiskey quite well. So we, you know, got a bit closer, I can’t really remember." Teddy grimaced. It was true that last New Year’s Eve I assume had initiated a Weasley family conga, during which I accidentally kicked Uncle Percy in the balls (we have no real proof that this was actually an accident). "And it just escalated, and then eventually I took him back to my dormitory, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

After a pause, he said, "look Rose, that sounds like a great time – congratulations, especially, on losing your virginity to someone you don’t even like. Firewhiskey really broadens your horizons,” he said sarcastically, “but way more importantly, were you safe?”

My heart stopped, and it dropped like a stone, right through my ribs.

_“Fuck!”_

I hadn’t thought about that at all. I hadn’t really taken any of this seriously until now. When I was at school, I’d felt a bit glamorous having had a boy – not just any boy, in fact, but Scorpius cheekbones-carved-by-the-gods Malfoy – in my bed, and it was quite cool to have such a huge secret. I had actually contemplated letting it slip somewhere, casually, in the library perhaps, while the fifth year gossips were sitting nearby, because it just didn’t seem that bad in Hogwarts. In fact, it felt a bit inevitable; he was Al’s best friend except I was Al’s best friend – it was your classic best man-maid of honour situation. It wasn’t till I’d got home that I’d began to contemplate how badly I’d messed up. “Oh my god. _Fuck!”_

"Rose, are you pregnant?" Teddy asked slowly.

"I don't know,” I moaned. “Oh my god. Teddy! What am I going to _do?”_ Just like that I'd had a vision that would have got me an O in OWL Divination. This affair was now going to hurtle downward at an alarming speed, because if anyone could get pregnant at Halloween on a one-night stand with Scorpius Malfoy, it would be me, wouldn’t it?

He just shook his head. “Fuck me if I know, Rosie.”

*

I’d thought that if I could tell Teddy, I could tell Al. He definitely deserved to know, and I hoped he’d have a less disappointed reaction than Teddy. I didn’t mind pissing people off a bit, but the look on Teddy’s face had been mildly heart-breaking. I was sort of looking for someone who would just shout at me.

I was actually standing outside Al’s room before I bottled out. The simple thing to do, I reasoned, would be to take a test and decide whether I actually needed to tell anyone else, or whether I could just keep this a massive secret for the rest of my life. It didn’t really make sense to go around telling everyone I could think of, if there weren’t going to be any consequences. I had absolutely no qualms about making Teddy take an unbreakable vow to the same effect, or just confounding him.

I'd borrowed three pregnancy tests from Nana Molly's girly cupboard, having never been so grateful for her forethought; it meant that I didn’t have to go out and embarrass myself by buying one from some corner-shop keeper, who would probably go on to tell my parents. Six sons had been wasted on Nana and her instincts.

So here I was, standing in the bathroom with the door locked, my back to the bath, on which I’d put the test once I’d used it. I'd peed on it, like the instructions said, and was now giving it time to change colour. I noticed distractedly that I was actually shaking.

I’d been counting down the five minutes in seconds, and I was approaching the last ten. “Ten, seconds,” I was telling myself, out loud all of a sudden. “Nine, eight, seven – four, three… two…” I had thought I might trick myself and turn on two, but it turns out that the brain is too clever for that sort of thing. “– one."

When I turned around, the end was glowing blue. It was an enchanted pregnancy test (with a startling percentage for accuracy). If I could have used my wand, I wouldn’t have had to wait five minutes for it to do the enchantment on its own, but if the Ministry came for me now, I’d have to tell everyone why I’d been kicked out for underage magic: underage sex.

All of my magical instincts had drained away, though; all I could think to do was repeat the motions, get a logical handle on all this. I went through it again, noting with some interest that I was producing large quantities of wee on command. It was a long five minutes and I knew I was only doing it to do something, because the chances of this test being wrong were about as slim as the chances of my parents forgiving me for this.

I couldn’t face doing the third, not even for the sake of giving my hands something to do. I didn’t think I had any wee left in me – or anything else. Everything had drained away, and I felt terrible. Suddenly I was retching over the toilet, not at all comforted by wry voice that suggested I must have had something inside me, because it was coming out violently.

*

I hadn’t planned on ever leaving the bathroom, but then there was Lily, trying to knock the door down because Fred had done something gross to the downstairs one, so I flushed the toilet for the fourth time, stuffed my pregnancy tests right into the bottom of the bin, and unlocked the door.

“Are you ok, Rose? You look terrible.”

I tugged the sleeves of my jumper down. “Yeah, I’m fine. Shouldn’t have gone to the Slug Club Christmas party, I think the hors d’oeuvres weren’t cooked properly.”

*

Al caught up with me as I was climbing the stairs.

“What’s up, Rose?” he asked firmly, straightening his glasses. “You’re in a really weird mood, I thought you’d be down there putting up lights, or, like, cutting up ten thousand paper snowflakes. Took you about three hours to get off the train.”

“Mm,” I nodded. “I’m just not feeling it today. It was fifteen minutes.”

“Something’s wrong,” he replied. “Come on, Rose, you can tell me anything.”

“Mm,” I repeated noncommittally.

“Oh, it can’t be that bad, Rose. You know me, I’ve kissed everyone and nothing terrible has happened yet. I’m sure it’s fine – it’s not like you’ve _killed a man_ , or you’re _pregnant,_ or anything?!”

Accidentally, I burst into tears.

A couple of minutes later I was sitting on Al’s bed and he was sitting on James’ bed opposite me, peering at me awkwardly while I wiped my eyes.

“Can I just confirm that you haven’t killed anyone, please, I want to know whether I should conduct this from behind a shield charm,” he half-grinned.

I shook my head miserably.

“Oh, Rose,” he sighed, reaching out to squeeze my hand. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” I mumbled.

We looked at each other for a moment, and then Al cleared his throat.

“Can I, er, ask you some things? Like – unless it was an immaculate conception, in which case let me tell you, I don’t need another chosen one in my life... Anyway, d’you mind me asking who you slept with?”

“Yes,” I replied gloomily, dropping my head. “I can’t tell you that.”

Al raised his eyebrows. I wondered if he’d work it out, or if he already knew more than I hoped. It was very unlikely that anything could happen to, well, _anyone,_ but especially to one of us, without it getting all the way round the school, but mine and Scorpius’ commitment to this secret had been defiant. He opened his mouth again. “Have you told your Mum and Dad yet?”

I shook my head. “How am I supposed to do that?”

He fell silent. “I don’t know,” he admitted after a moment. “I, er… I don’t think they’ll like this.”

I laughed humourlessly.

“Look, Rose – are you ok?” he asked seriously.

I shrugged. On the one hand, I’d never felt less ok in my life. On the other hand, there was only one hand.

“It’ll be fine,” he said eventually. He continued, gathering some strength, “of course it’ll be alright, these things are always fine in the end, Rose. Remember Eve Cresswell? She got pregnant when we were in third year, d’you remember? It was fine, her parents didn’t even disown her.” He cracked a small grin.

I nodded. “Cheers, Al. Think I need to be on my own for a bit, if you don’t mind.”

“’Course not. Cheer up, Granger. Not like you’ve killed a man.”

*

“Rose, I haven’t seen you since September and now you’re up here all on your own, is something going on?”

Mum and Dad had found my pit of despair, and any semblance of control that I had over this secret was about to be surrendered. I’d thought I was grown up enough for all of this – to have sex with someone I didn’t really know if I liked, to keep something monumental to myself – but I wasn’t, I’d realised, watching Teddy and Al’s faces fall, them floundering for words, trying to find something grown up to say back.

I shrugged. “Was a bit noisy downstairs, I’ve got a headache.”

“Lily said she thought you were feeling sick, is there anything you need, love?”

“Just want to be on my own for a bit.”

“Rose, this isn’t like you at all. Your dad _said_ you were behaving oddly. Is there anything you need to tell us?”

“No,” I insisted, with the conviction of a soggy piece of parchment. “No, it was just a pretty full-on week, you know? Slug Club party, test in Charms, and I got bitten by a venomous tentacula on Tuesday, and –” I fell silent, aware that everyone in the room remained unconvinced.

Mum stared at me firmly. “Sweetheart, if you don’t tell us what’s going on, I’ll take a guess. And I’ll be right.”

If I knew anything at all, I knew that this was true. I rubbed my hand across my eyes, trying to buy some time to work out how to confess with minimal collateral damage. I could picture Dad hitting the roof and going right through it, if I led with the worst bit. But then there was the other worst bit. Not looking at either of my parents, I mumbled, “I’m pregnant.”

Blood spread across Dad’s face, starting at his nose, diffusing outwards. He looked flushed, but the temperature of the room seemed to have dropped. I wondered if that was Mum, in a rare bought of uncontrolled magic. I drew my duvet around me and waited for someone to say something.

“Say that again, Rosie,” Dad said slowly. I didn’t think that would help, but I repeated it tonelessly, like I was reporting it happening to someone else – Eve Cresswell, perhaps. That had been the one helpful thing that Al had imparted: this _had_ happened to someone else, and as far as we knew, they hadn’t _died._

“How did this happen, Rose?” Mum asked finally, although I didn’t think it was the question she really wanted to be asking.

“Oh, you know… the usual way.”

“This isn’t the moment for _jokes,_ Rose!” Dad cried out.

“Sorry,” I replied, not having much else to say, because it really wasn’t the time for jokes.

“Ron, please don’t _shout._ Rose – you had better start talking right now.”

The empty threat was more than good enough for me. “There was this Halloween party – James’ –” I was going to drop everyone in as much as I possibly could. When my parents inevitably dropped _me,_ I needed the fall to be cushioned by the weight of everyone else’s fuck ups. “And, you know… it happened like you’d expect – firewhiskey, wine, very bad decisions, that kind of thing. I slept with someone, I mean,” I added for clarity.

“Who?” Mum asked in a dangerous voice.

This was the moment that I could avoid with Al; what could he really do except swear a bit? I could lie, but my world was small and this was very big, and I just didn’t think I’d get away with it for long. This was bad, but at least I was being honest straight up, that had to count for _something_ with the authorities. “Scorpius Malfoy,” I muttered.

“No, I didn’t quite catch that, Rose,” Dad replied in a high-pitched voice, his tone betraying. I knew that if I said anything else at all now, I’d probably be forgiven, in comparison to what I had revealed. Dad would genuinely rather hear that I had shagged a dragon.

I took a deep breath and repeated, “Scorpius Malfoy. I think you know him – blonde, tall, pureblood?”

One of the windows suddenly shattered.

“Oh, Ronald, get a grip,” Mum said, but it felt like force of habit because she was looking at me like she’d never seen me before in my life. “Calm down.”

“I will not calm down!” Dad exclaimed incredulously. “I’ve never felt less calm in my life; my daughter slept with Malfoy. She _slept_ with Draco Malfoy’s son, Hermione!”

“Yes, I had worked that out for myself,” she said coldly.

“I warned you Rose,” he continued frantically. “I told you he was trouble!” Yes, I remembered this. I had thought about it two hundred times in the last couple of months; I remembered being told those words better than I remembered my own name.

“Well, I’ve done it now!” I retorted, and for the first time I was shouting. “It’s not like I can take it _back!”_

“They’re a horrible family, Rose, you don’t want to get mixed up with that –”

“Oh yeah, _Merlin forbid_ a Weasley gets too close to a secure bloodline –”

“Rose –”

I ignored Mum, launching into something else I would soon wish I could take back: “he’s Al’s best mate! Uncle Harry has him round loads, he doesn’t have a problem with it! In fact, no one else has a problem with it; people like Malfoy, and I’m sure people like his dad! The only person who can’t get past things that happened _twenty years ago_ is you!”

Dad’s face was livid and I was starting to feel quite scared. “Rose,” he began in a low voice. “When Malfoy was your age I was trapped in his basement, listening to his family torture your mother through the floorboards. You’ll excuse me for not personally having forgiven them, much less wanting them anywhere near our family.”

I went cold all over, wishing I’d never said what I’d said, wishing I’d never heard what I now knew. “Oh Ron,” Mum said after a moment. “Look, she didn’t mean that. Things are very different now – I don’t think Rose can imagine –”

What had seemed like a chivalrous gesture turned nasty very quickly. “Oh, do you feel the same way, Hermione? Just waiting for the time to get close to the Malfoys? _‘Draco’s not so bad, Ron, we have a few classes together’_.” It was a poor imitation of Mum.

“Oh, for God’s sake Ron,” Mum snapped, her own tone changed just as fleetingly. “You always do this.”

“Always do _what,_ Hermione?”

“You’ve never trusted me and I, for one, don’t know what the issue is because I have never once lied to you. Draco is the product of something much nastier than him, and I think he deserved a chance to gain a reputation outside of that. That _doesn’t mean_ I wish I was married to him.”

Things were now getting very weird and I thought I was hearing partial sides of other arguments, decades old. They stared at each other for ages, hashing out something private, something else that I’d unearthed when I’d let Scorpius take my dress off, kiss my neck, put his hands against my waist, two months ago. “That’s not the point,” Dad said finally, which was true. “They’re _dangerous.”_

“Ron – that was twenty-five years –”

“Anyway,” Dad interrupted the rest of Mum’s defence. “It’s alright, Rose, we’ll sort this out, I’ll come with you to St Mungo’s. We can go tomorrow. I won’t let Malfoy get away with this.”

 _“Get away with what?”_ I retorted, finding my voice to be quite shrill, quite hard to take seriously. “He didn’t _do anything bad_ , Dad, it was just a _mistake!”_

Mum, also, was squaring up, the full weight of her legal career behind her, and just for two minutes she was on my side. “Don’t make this into something it isn’t,” she snapped. “That would be childish, even for you.”

“Well, what _are_ we going to do about it then?” he exclaimed, hysterically. “Obviously Rose isn’t going to –”

“Why not!” I interrupted. “I’m perfectly –”

“Rose, you’ve got no idea what you’re getting yourself into,” Mum cut straight across me. “It would be very unwise –”

“I don’t think this is anyone else’s decision!”

We had sailed right past rational discussion ages ago, although I wasn’t sure it had ever had a real chance to begin with. “Of course it is, you’re still a _child,”_ Dad replied, ‘child’ sounding like the dirty word that we were all mostly avoiding. The brief respite where they had been inside each other’s heads, making arguments that I couldn’t make any sense of, was over and now I was at the centre of everything again.

“Not for much longer! I got into this; I should be the person who decides how to deal with it!”

“If you do this just to prove a point you will regret it for the rest of your life,” Mum declared. I wished she knew me less well. That’s exactly the sort of thing I would do.

“I’m going to do the right thing,” I insisted, sounding a lot more virtuous than I really felt. “Whatever that is, whether you agree with it or not.”

“Look Rose, I know it feels that way but we’re your parents, we know about these things,” Dad was saying, his tone hardly gentle. “We just want what’s best for you.”

“If you were so good at that, maybe this wouldn’t have happened in the first place,” I replied, regretting it even as the words left my mouth. I was embarrassed and anxious, it had wound me right up, I would have said anything. In the morning I wouldn’t mean any of it. I didn’t want to have it out with my parents – what I _really_ wanted was to have a long, hot bath and a bit of a cry – but none of us had listened, we’d all exploded instead, the worst of both of my parents, amplified in me, and now we were here and I was saying things that would be hard to take back.

Dad was out of the door, storming down the stairs. Mum had stayed, but she was hardly looking at me when she said, “you’ll want to see Madam Pomfrey, of course, once you get back to school.”

I nodded, once, subdued. I was starting to see that there was no ‘we’ in this affair. There was Mum and Dad, Rose, no baby, or there was Rose and baby, no grandparents. I didn’t know which was more devastating.

“And, Rose, I just need to ask,” she continued coldly, “does Malfoy … Scorpius – know that he’s a father now?”

I shook my head miserably and she sighed, her expression furious. A long silence followed and neither of us filled it; there weren’t really any words to express the magnitude of that. Before they’d burst in, I had been constructing my preferred outcome for all this, and it was clearly an untouchable, philosophical ideal: in this reality, there was no way to pass through the nine months with no mess, growing and nurturing a tiny baby, just the two of us out in the world. We had learnt about parallel universes in Muggle Studies in fifth year, and I hoped there was a version of me out there, same fuck up but just getting on with it, free from the web of people that I had let down. Finally, Mum got up and crossed the room, not turning around. Watching her go was a much bigger betrayal than my volatile father; he was guaranteed to react badly. Mum had spent the whole nasty affair looking at me like ‘we’ve given you every opportunity in the world to have whatever you wanted and you’ve done just about all you can to throw it back in our faces’, and I felt very ashamed, because it was true.


	2. "Christmas shopping can suck my dick" - Al, at some point, probably

The door flung open and there was Dom, eyes blazing, hair effortlessly great. She glared at me. “Something to tell me, Rose?”

My heart sank. “Who told you?”

“Al.” She rolled her eyes, frustrated. “He didn’t want to; I had to swear on my life that I wouldn’t tell anyone. He relented because he said you needed someone emotionally literate to look out for you.”

I didn’t say anything.

She continued, already starting to run out of steam, “I sort of guessed. Some of it, anyway.”

“Yeah. Right.” My mouth was very dry. I’d used up all my good words, lying to Lily, being honest with Al, defending myself to my parents. I didn’t have the energy to be put through it all again. My instinct was always to apologise, just in case it helped, but I was starting to get sick of mitigating this for everyone else. It wasn’t my fault that no one knew how to react to bad news.

Dom looked like she wanted an apology.

She had found me still in bed, where I’d been since _the parent affair,_ my knees up to my chest, staring out of the window, not seeing anything. I hadn’t made it down to dinner, but she later told me that Mum had told everyone I had food poisoning – convincing Lily, if no one else. Uncle Harry subsequently revealed that my parents had had one of their infamous rows, ten feet apart in the garden later the same night. There were a lot of logistics to this that I had wanted to ask about: why hadn’t I heard them, was everyone now uncomfortably pretending they didn’t know everything I had so painstakingly kept secret? Anticipating this, he had winked and just said “ _magic”_ , which was hardly an answer but if it meant that Uncle Percy didn’t know anything about my sex life, then I wasn’t going to argue.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Rose?” Dom wanted to know. 

I made a few sounds that didn’t really amount to words, but she was glaring at me so I snapped, “I didn’t tell anyone, alright?” 

She sighed loudly.

My patience had been ground so far down throughout the course of the day, and I thought Dom was just about to get on the wrong side of it. “Please don’t fucking start, Dom, I am so sick of all of this. It just made loads of sense for neither of us to tell anyone, it wasn’t that big a deal and I thought everyone would _make_ it a big deal if we did. I _obviously_ didn’t expect it to have… long term repercussions.” 

Plaintively, she replied, “I’m your best friend, Rose.”

“Yeah,” I agreed absent-mindedly, unsure what that had to do with anything. “Wait, what? Do you want to be its godparent or something?”

Her expression softened in amusement, but she seemed to still be telling me off. 

“No, I mean, people tell their best friends when they have massive secrets. Like, James would tell Fred, if he ever did anything at all of value to the wider community. Hazel would probably tell Catriona, you know,” Hazel was one of the other girls in our dormitory. She didn’t tell _me_ anything anymore because I’d accidentally revealed to James that she had a crush on him when we were in fourth year, and he had handled it with all the tact of Peeves inside a suit of armour. Dom was still talking. “– Malfoy would tell Al.”

I looked round sharply. “What?”

“Best friends _tell_ each other stuff,” she replied irritatedly.

“No, about Scor – Malfoy.”

“He and Al. They’re best friends. He probably thought to mention it to Al when he lost his virginity.”

“Right, yeah,” I muttered. It really was best if I never spoke again. Fucking Lady Macbeth had been less desperate to start confessing than I was. 

Dom stared at me. “You’re not normally so worried about Malfoy, Rose.”

She already knew. I was fed up with all of these people seeing right through me, like I was an open book and every page read _I SLEPT WITH SCORPIUS MALFOY._ “I just didn’t hear you properly.”

She raised her great eyebrows. “It was him, wasn’t it?”

“What? _No_! Of course not! We barely like each other!” I exclaimed hotly. I had no idea why I was denying it; firstly, I’d already told my parents and Teddy, and secondly, it was true.

“Exactly! You _lost your virginity to Scorpius Malfoy_! Oh Merlin, _Rose_!”

“Shut up!” I argued, but my voice was shaking.

“You’re carrying _a Malfoy?_ ” She might as well have said ‘ _you’re carrying_ a flobberworm _?_ ’, all of the incredulity that she managed to pour into it. 

“ _Can you stop saying Malfoy_?” I hissed. “I’m sure it doesn’t look like it, but I’m trying to keep it a _secret_.”

Dom was sitting on my bed now, her face softer, sympathetic, even. “You have _really_ screwed up, Rose.” Actually, it was what I needed to hear.

I buried my burning face in my hands. “I know,” I sighed. “I am acutely aware of that.”

“Oh babe… I thought you wanted your first time to mean something.” Dom’s view had been that she had better get the worst of sex out of the way, see what it was like, what worked, start practising early for a teenage career in getting the most pleasure out of it. She’d lost her virginity just before fifth year, and it felt like an onwards and upwards kind of journey. I had been of the opinion that the other person was quite important to the dynamic and I wanted to really trust them and, I had naively assumed, probably like them as well.

“Look, it… it meant something.”

“Rose, it’s ok, you don’t have to _lie_.”

“Not like you were there,” I shot back. “It was all good Dom. Some of it was great. In another life, I’d liked to have done it more than once.”

“ _When_? _How_ did you manage to keep this a secret?”

“Halloween,” I muttered. “You know, the party. I don’t know, he just didn’t say anything, and I definitely didn’t want to. I guess the key to a good secret is wanting to die of embarrassment before sharing it.”

“I _thought_ you weren’t there at the end of the night!” she exclaimed triumphantly. “But when I got back your drapes were drawn, so I just assumed you’d already passed out drunk.”

“Probably not at that point, no.”

“So wait – _Malfoy was in the dormitory?”_

I nodded.

“How did you manage that? I thought it was enchanted!”

This was the biggest mystery of all; the rumour was that boys couldn’t get into the girls’ dormitory, and as far as I knew, it had never been challenged. Scorpius, who was boy all the way through, had walked up the stairs confidently, one of his hands steadying the bottom of my back because if anyone was likely to make a false step it was me. It had puzzled me for weeks; in some other circumstance, I’d have asked Mum, the only person I knew to have bothered to read _Hogwarts: A History,_ Volumes I _and_ II, or even Uncle Harry, who had the secrets of the castle all worked out, from the Room of Requirement to the seven passageways out, including, supposedly, the one under the Whomping Willow. My own theories were that I had been unwavering in my determination to get Scorpius up, so the staircase had relented, or that he had become an extension of me, connected by my sweaty grip the whole time. Whatever the reason, we were firmly unhindered, another chance at contraception somehow passed by. I said just about as much to Dom.

She nodded slowly. “That sort of makes sense. I dunno – no one’s ever tried, have they, I don’t really know what would happen if they did. I just go to them, usually. God, I can’t believe you just let us go about our morning and didn’t tell us Malfoy was there.”

“No, he left really early,” I replied. “Felt like something he’d done before.”

“Oh, yeah, I reckon! Hey, did notice that Catriona didn’t come back the other night, after the Christmas drinks. Where d’you think she was?” And just like that, we’d moved off the topic of my own crisis to other people’s business, doing what we did best. I told her as much as I knew about the James-Al-Eliza Bones triangle, and she confirmed that she had seen Lily and Lorcan embarking on a silent but passionate goodbye on the train when she had gone to the toilet. I happened to overhear at breakfast that morning that Rowan from our dormitory had been flirting with Fran Longbottom during meals and in Charms lessons recently, and we wondered if that would come to anything, or if Fran was serious about staying single after what had been a drawn out, on-again-off-again thing with Margot Zabini for the best part of a year. Dom told me a bit about Matthew Vaisey, from the Slytherin Quidditch team, who she’d sort of started to see, which for Dom just meant snog in broom closets. It sounded nice, grown up, normal. I was happy for her; she had really lit up when she talked about it.

I had thought that Lily and Roxanne might sneak upstairs for a bit with the same idea, to our cosy little attic which was animated long after everyone else had gone to bed. For Lily, gossip was seriously part of the currency of her Hogwarts days, and I had never known her pass up the opportunity to get some information from the older years to use as leverage in the new term, or just to know – some of her friends jokingly called her ‘the loop’; some of us were in it, but Lily _was_ it. At Hogwarts, I felt like I spent a lot of time with noisy boys – Al and some of his Slytherin mates, James, Fred and the rest of the seventh year boys, _all_ of whom I fancied. Dom loved to flirt, and I felt very at home in the atmosphere created by the Potter boys’ easy smiles and quick jokes, so it was a dynamic that really worked. But I loved it when I came home and spent some time with my younger, girlier cousins, and giggled for weeks and drank cider in secret at the bottom of the garden, and took trips with Lily into muggle London and went out of my way to lift their self-esteem after a break up or a bad test score.

Eventually, Dom and I started to get ready for bed, and everything that I had dislodged that evening seemed very far away. I felt very warm and giggly and teenage up at the top of the Burrow, discussing our six degrees of separation from the English national Quidditch team, and wondering if Rollins, the fit beater, would take a sixteen-year-old on a date. It was the first time I’d felt sixteen all day. I was starting to think that I’d feel better if I slept on it – that was what Mum always said, anyway. In hindsight, the sort of problems she usually meant were arguing with Dom and accidentally sharing other peoples’ secrets. Nonetheless, I thought a long lie-in, followed by a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, would go some way to making things feel easier.

I was digging around for my pyjamas, in a trunk that looked as though it had been ransacked by a niffler, when I accidentally pulled out the lingerie I’d been wearing the night of Halloween. It was a whole thing, part of a costume. Sixth year had kicked off like a bacchanal; the relief of having ten OWLs had been powerful. With the weight Care of Magical Creatures, Divination, History of Magic and Muggle Studies lifted, I was on good form and it was certainly infectious, in a back-and-forth kind of way. Teachers took us more seriously and everything else less seriously, now they’d seen us through our exams, and there were some good perks, like free time. People were turning seventeen most weeks, accompanied with loud, hedonistic parties, or quiet but long evenings getting drunker and drunker in the Common Room. I’d come out of a relationship that, it turned out, hadn’t meant very much anyway, more of a month-long fling, really, so insignificant that no one had even thought to ask if that guy was the father – and when James had proposed his Halloween rager, I was there with everyone, professing that it was the best idea since the time turner. 

I tried to stuff it away, but Dom’s head whipped round like she’d spotted a snitch in the corner of the room. “What is _that_ , Rose?”

I flushed bright red. “Nothing. Knickers. Really normal knickers.”

“That’s hardly just knickers! Oh Rose, you saucy bitch, I had no idea –” For context, reader, Dom was sprawled across the scratchy purple blanket that Nana had knitted for her bed, wearing a nightshirt so short it hardly covered her arse cheeks.

“Stop it!” I cried. “Stop talking, Dom, just _stop_.”

“Where did you get it?” she asked, teasing, wiggling her eyebrows all over the place.

I closed my eyes, which made it a bit easier to confess, “I bought it when I was seeing Nicholas Wood.”

“But I thought you never – with Nicholas, I mean.”

“ _No_ ,” I said through gritted teeth. “Not with Nicholas, no.”

The way that only a girl with the blood of a race distinguished for their sex appeal could, Dom had put two and two together and reached the magic number. “With Malfoy?”

“I – _perhaps_ with Malfoy, yes.”

“Christ, Rosie, I take it _all_ back. It must have meant _something,_ in that underwear!”

I was flaming with embarrassment, hot all over, but I knew Dom was just teasing. I knew I’d do the same thing to her, and I knew that she wasn’t trying to wreck my self-esteem, it was just her way of being part of it all. And it was easier with Dom as part of it, I had to admit. As I’d told Teddy, Al and my parents, and watched their faces fall each time, I could hardly imagine getting a good thing out of all this, but with Dom it was all ‘you must have been _so drunk_ ’ and ‘did you finish Rose, is Malfoy really as good as they say he is’ and ‘was it like you’d imagined’, and it all felt a lot more like something I was supposed to do at sixteen.

*

Uncle Harry had cornered me while I was eating my bacon sandwich, to ask if I wouldn’t mind coming to the shop with him, Nana needed some soap. He and I found ourselves the only people in a room maybe once a year, and by accident. When I came out of the house in my jacket and my pyjama bottoms, to find Auntie Ginny waiting for us both, I wondered if I was about to experience the world class good-cop-bad-cop that James so often fell foul of.

“Thought I’d join you if you don’t mind, Rose,” she said brightly. I could only shake my head in silence.

We set off, both Harry and Ginny chatting, not to each other but at me: _how was your term; I heard from James that you scored some spectacular goals; are you getting the hang of non-verbal magic yet, it’s tricky isn’t it; oh you know I started to get quite fond of the Slug Club parties in my sixth year_ , that kind of thing. This continued all the way over the hill, despite my non-committal responses: _yeah, fine; yeah, I guess; yeah, it is; ha, that’s hard to believe._ This hardly engendered a rousing conversation about Slughorn’s favourites, although I did accidentally reveal that James had dodged every single invitation he’d been offered in seven years, and Harry declared that he would be talking to him about that, he had no idea what a great wizard Slughorn had been. Despite this scintillating chat, they’d run out of things to lighten the mood with by the time we reached the local newsagent, and Ginny had popped in for the soap. I imagined this wasn’t usually how it happened for the Potter kids; they probably didn’t have to walk all the way to the local shop before they got their telling off.

“Look, Rose,” Harry began. “We, er – well, your mum told us what’s been going on – and then she and your dad had a loud shouting match in the garden,” he interrupted himself. Both of us fought a smile at that image. “– and they went back home last night to, er… sort this out,” he continued delicately.

“You can’t sort out twenty years of shit in two days,” I mumbled inadvertently. Immediately I could have kicked myself, because it wasn’t even really true that Mum and Dad had twenty years of shit, it was just this one thing, that I didn’t really even understand, that reared its head every now and then.

To my relief, Harry laughed. “They don’t really have twenty years of shit, just a communication problem. Anyway,” he continued, “in their absence, whatever that proves to be, I just wanted to say that Gin and I, we’ll always look out for you – anything you need.”

I stared at him, feeling about as uncomfortable in my own skin as I had when Slughorn had made us test each other’s Polyjuice potion, and I had spent the second half of the double lesson looking like Catriona. I was starting to say ‘thank you’, when Ginny reappeared and correctly assessed the atmosphere.

“Christ, Harry, have you made it weird?”

“What? _No_ , I was just telling Rose –”

“Look, Rose,” she interrupted, passing him the shopping bag. “We’re your godparents. You can hang out at Grimmauld Place any time. You’ve done a bit of a stupid thing, but we don’t care – in fact, Harry quite likes Scorpius.”

Harry shrugged. “Draco always did want to be my best friend.”

*

There was a loud _pop_ , and with a sinking feeling, I suspected that James had just apparated outside the bathroom. The seventh year girls’ dormitory had no idea how fortunate they were that he couldn’t apparate inside the Hogwarts grounds. 

“Rose!” James called out brightly.

“What?” I mumbled. I was sitting on the toilet seat glumly, having just seen off the end of my lunch.

“Are you ok?” He sounded far too enthusiastic to take anything seriously.

“Yeah.”

“Liar,” Fred’s voice interrupted.

“How d’you figure?” I replied. “Just feeling a bit unwell, it’s that food poisoning from the Slug Club Christmas party, I think, back again.”

“You don’t _sound_ like you’ve got food poisoning,” James replied suspiciously.

“Oh brilliant Potter, make sure you don’t go into medicine. ‘You don’t _sound_ like you’ve got dragon pox, dunno why your face is so spotty’.”

“Well Al didn’t get food poisoning,” he argued.

“He didn’t eat much,” I snapped. “What are you, the Wizengamot? Look, I’m fine. What are you doing here staking out my trip to the bathroom?”

“Mum sent us up to find you and get you outside, we’re organising a Quidditch game. Us three, Al, Lily, Mum, Dad, your Dad, Uncle Charlie, might be able to get Teddy involved. If Uncle George gets home in time, he promised to reprise the Gryffindor winning team of ‘93.”

“Why didn’t she come, then?” I muttered. “I could do with some emotional intelligence in this conversation.” It was appealing, though, a high quality, high stakes game of Quidditch to blow off some steam. Although Auntie Ginny was leagues away from the rest of us, there was an unreasonable amount of talent to a Weasley game: enough to put off an amateur player. I quite fancied scoring forty goals against Dad; it was a bit like what I really wanted to do, which was throw something at him.

“I am _so_ emotionally intelligent, Rose, Alexa Flint told me –”

“Yeah, whatever,” I interrupted, thinking I would rather throw up again than know what Alexa Flint thought about emotional intelligence. “I’ll play, give me a minute.”

It was shaping up to be a good game, but it ended abruptly when Uncle George’s bludger caught me round the ear and instead of behaving like an adult about it, I jumped off my broom and ran back towards the house, trying not to cry. Teddy caught up with me while James and Al argued about whether it was 230-210 or 230-220; James had scored just as I’d been hit and no one could decide whether it was a foul. Uncle Harry and Auntie Ginny had stayed to catch the snitch, declaring feebly that we had lost too many to this kind of thing. A snitch for amateur, garden Quidditch hardly cost more than three galleons, and even then, Auntie Ginny could get them for free if she wanted to, through the Prophet’s connections.

“Rose, you’re all over the shop, are you ok?” he asked gently.

I threw myself down onto the grass and hugged my knees to my chest. Now the adrenaline of being on my broom was flooding out of me, I felt cold.

He sat down next to me and stared down the garden. “Do you know something I don’t?”

He'd been away a few days, at work and with his grandmother, so he'd missed all of the headlines. I nodded miserably. 

“Oh, Rose,” he said finally, with more emotional intelligence than James had displayed in nearly twenty years. Alexa Flint probably would have climaxed. “I’m sorry, kid.”

I nodded again, and then I said in an empty voice, “I’ve really fucked it. Pregnant at sixteen.”

“Hey,” he retorted fiercely; it was strong enough to get me to finally turn and look at him. “You’re so much more than that, Rose, don’t you ever bloody forget it, alright! You’re kind and funny and diplomatic, you have great friends and all your teachers think you’re fantastic. I’ve known you your entire life and you’ve never fucked anything up – this is no exception, alright?”

“Teddy, my parents will never speak to me again.”

“Then that’s their problem,” he replied firmly. “They’re the adults, Rose.”

This is what everyone had failed to say: Al, Dom, my aunt and uncle. I had wanted people to tell me what a mistake it was, because it was true, but I hadn’t realised that they had to balance it with something softer, kinder – yes it’s a mistake, but we all make them; yes it’s a mistake, but we don’t love you any less.

I let my eyes fill up and I concentrated on watching Auntie Ginny on her broom, comfortable and talented, showing off. I watched as she stood up on it, to make Harry laugh, the kind of thing that would give any spectator a heart attack if anyone with less control than Ginny had done it. She dropped back into her seat and promptly spun three hundred and sixty degrees. He entered into an impressive spiral dive but his gaze was hardly looking for a glint of gold in the dusk, it was trained on the fire of her hair.

*

The days blurred into one another, distinguished not by hours but by moments: wrapping presents in the attic with Lily and Roxanne, more games of Quidditch, long evenings punctuated only by the appearance of dessert wine, cheese, chocolate. One afternoon Nana asked if we would decorate the tree and I volunteered myself immediately, only to find that the only other person who had fallen for it was Molly because she loved to organise. What I had imagined as a chaotic, colourful, loud afternoon proved to be subdued, except where we disagreed over whether it should be white and red or gold and silver.

There was always a game of something going on: wizard chess, exploding snap, dirty word scrabble (the latter was only popular with James, Fred, Al and Teddy but it always made for a compelling tournament; wizard scrabble had a habit of shrilly berating you if a word wasn’t real, and try as he might, James couldn’t get the board to accept _cockwaffle_ ) _._ People would dip in and out, with family and other grandparents to see; one evening, after there had been veritable _chaos_ for a number of days, we found it unexpectedly quiet, just the four of us, Nana and Granddad, the Potters and Uncle George, the rest of his family with his mother-in-law. Everyone was very drunk, louder than usual, if anything. Even Hugh and Lily had been offered small glasses of wine by Granddad – Lily was doing a stellar job of pretending she had never encountered it before. It was actually sort of nice to have the table a little less crowded; with fewer people there, Uncle George, Uncle Harry and Auntie Ginny found themselves reminiscing over the year they had stayed at Hogwarts over Christmas for the Yule Ball – Mum and Dad were subdued throughout this episode. Then they moved onto the following one, where Granddad had been injured in his war effort and, as far as any of us could work out, Harry had chosen to believe he had the spirit of Voldemort inside him – “I think it was just arrogance,” Ginny teased. “You were _so_ full of yourself that whole year, _and_ it was before you’d even heard the prophecy.” Grandad was a little less jovial, or at least, he sounded totally serious when he reminded his daughter that Harry saved his life that Christmas. Harry was not the only one feeling reflective; George, who was on good form, was telling the five of us about his brother and how one of the things that they had meant to do during their time at Hogwarts was to charm all twelve of the Christmas trees to follow Professor Dumbledore around, singing Christmas carols. Nana declared that it was a good thing that they never worked out how to, because the embarrassment would have sent her to an early grave. For a moment, the words ‘early grave’ stopped everyone dead. Ginny’s eyes filled with tears, and over the table Harry drew her a little closer to him, but his eyes were dancing when he said, “on a good day, I reckon Dumbledore would have loved that. He always liked Christmas. Maybe not that one in 1995, though, he was in a terrible mood that year.” Then Dad called him ‘Dumbledore’s man through and through’, and they laughed for ages, fondly, although Nana Molly still looked sad. 

The next day was even quieter because Harry had taken his kids to Godric’s Hollow to spend an afternoon in the village, like they always did. He always invited Teddy, although Teddy didn’t always go, because Harry reckoned it would have made all the difference to know that other people spent parts of Christmas lost in thought at the side of a grave. And, although they would be subdued, Teddy helped make up the numbers for the three-a-side game of Quidditch that they played every year, on the land behind the run-down cottage. I had seen it a few times when I was younger. Harry didn’t know much about it all, but he knew that was meant to be a Quidditch pitch; Al thought that was the one thing he knew about what his childhood would have been like, in one of those other universes where he and his parents had got to know each other. He had never touched the cottage, although it was also his (I’d heard Harry joke that when you lose so much family you acquire a lot of houses; it wasn’t funny), but he had cleared up the land, over time, painfully. When they got back, all three of his kids had been firmly impressed upon by the gravity of the event, as they always were; it continued to be impossible for them to imagine living in any of the circumstances that they would go and visit. It was still impossible for any of us to imagine the symbol that Harry Potter was. 

*

It was a couple of days after that, that I was waiting by the door of Flourish and Blotts for Al to finish paying for the latest Harry Potter biography, as a joke for his dad. I was all for books, and bookshops, and paying for things, but the Christmas crowds in Diagon Alley were enough to turn you away from anything you loved.

“Where next?” Al asked, appearing at my shoulder.

“Well, who have we done?”

“Your mum, my dad, Nana and Granddad, Dom, Teddy, Lily…” he trailed off, thinking.

I looked at the bags I was carrying. “Vic, Fred, Roxy…”

Al groaned. “Not James.”

I rolled my eyes. “Brilliant,” I said sarcastically. “It’s such a joy to shop for you brother. What are you getting him?”

“I’ll probably just buy him the new Cannons robes.”

“Yeah, but if you do that, I can’t buy him a Cannons _t-shirt_ ,” I argued. “It’s all about me, Albus.”

He shoved into me with his shoulder. We’d drifted out of Flourish and Blotts, and we were standing in the cold opposite Madam Malkin’s.

“Let’s just go for a butterbeer,” Al decided. “Maybe I won’t even get him anything. He did get with Eliza Bones after all, he probably doesn’t deserve it.” I grinned wryly, but I was also still blaming James for certain events earlier in the term, so maybe he _didn’t_ deserve anything.

Al and I squashed into a booth in a packed Leaky Cauldron, our shopping bags taking up all the extra space. We fell silent for a while, exhausted.

“I really hate Christmas shopping,” he said finally.

“I thought I was going to do it all out of catalogues,” I moaned. “And then I didn’t and now it’s too late for owl order.”

He half grinned. “That’s your fault, Rose.”

“Yeah, whatever. What are you getting your mum?”

“Fuck knows!” he exclaimed. “She really has got everything. How about your dad?”

“Socks, at this rate,” I replied. An understanding look flashed across Al’s face. I had briefly mentioned how fraught my relationship with my parents had become, but what Dom had said about best friends had inadvertently become a warning, and I was avoiding telling Al anything too specific, that he might trace back to Malfoy.

“How about Uncle Bill, and Uncle Charlie and everyone?” he asked, changing the subject.

I shook my head. “My love,” I replied sincerely, and Al cracked up.

“And Molly and Lucy?” I asked eventually.

He rolled his eyes. “Maybe I’ll knit them matching cardigans.”

“Uncle Percy does like it when they match, doesn’t he?”

Al raised his eyebrow. “Rose, he doesn’t get out much, we shouldn’t deny him the simple pleasures.”

I snorted with laughter and spilt a little butterbeer into my lap. “D'you think it’s ok to forgo him on the gift list, on account of his deserting the family almost ten years before I was born?”

“Well, it’ll ensure an argument on Christmas day – but I get the sense you might want that.”

I smirked. “Would be nice to argue about something different for once. Are you finished? We’d better face the cold again, otherwise we’ll be stuck here when everyone finishes work, and I’ll probably get confused and floo to the wrong house again.”

Al sniggered. “That was so funny.”

“It was possibly the most embarrassing thing I’ve _ever_ done,” I corrected him. “Come on.”

Al and I had ‘stone-cloak-wand’-ed for who got to buy James Chudley Cannons merchandise, and Al had won, as usual, so reluctantly I’d joined the crowds in Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes to try and find something. I’d spent a whole chunk of my life hanging out in the shop and whenever I saw people at school with Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes products – which was most days in the common room – I felt a real rush of pride, but at times like these I thought I’d take the permanent solitude of Azkaban over the consumerist hell that Dad and Uncle George thrived off. I couldn’t move for people; I had to wait until someone squeezed out of the building with their purchase, to be shoved up to the next aisle of jokes, pranks and painful looking instruments that I wouldn’t trust even if Uncle Harry ran them through all his forces of evil detection systems, and promised they were safe. Dad was a bit of a marketing genius, but Uncle George was the madman behind most of their products, still, more than twenty years after Dad had jumped ship from the Ministry and joined him, so I didn’t ever feel totally safe holding a product until I’d made Uncle George show me which end it punched from.

Eventually I spotted George at the top of the stairs, coming out of the storm room, and painfully, possibly breaking a few customers’ toes, forced my way over to him.

“Alright, Rose?” he grinned. “Come on, come up here, it’s quieter.”

I climbed the stairs gratefully, closely followed by Al, and surveyed the chaos. “This is mental,” I shook my head in disbelief. Every year they seemed to do better than the one before. The Weasley fortunes had changed since 1998 – it was a relatively respected name and it was rare for anyone to have anything second hand these days – but if anyone was responsible for anything resembling an inheritance, it was Uncle George and his twin. 

“It’s paying for your Christmas presents, I wouldn’t complain,” he replied.

“We haven’t seen them yet,” I muttered darkly.

He grinned knowingly, and tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger. “Anyway, who are you shopping for?”

“Auntie Audrey,” I deadpanned, and they both laughed.

“The woman’s avoided our shop for seven years, Rose, I can’t imagine she’d appreciate a Christmas present from here.”

“Has she really?” I asked with interest.

He nodded. “Yep. Hates it. She always did, but when she came in the last time, she really embarrassed herself. But that’s a story for another time. Is it James?”

I rolled my eyes. “Unfortunately.”

“Well, I’ve got a few things in the back that we’re working on… not sure if they’re one hundred percent safe…”

“He’d like that,” Al interrupted. “As long as it can’t accidentally kill him, because mum wouldn’t like that.”

“No, no, I try to stay in your mother’s good books,” George grinned. “She’s a force to be reckoned with; the only people I’m more scared of than your mother are my wife and my own mother.”

Al raised his eyebrows. “Trust me – I know.” We followed Uncle George down the back stairs to the basement.

“We’ve been working on a new range of Quidditch fun recently,” he explained, embarking on something of a sales pitch. “Randomly invisible quaffles, brooms that put on sudden bursts of speed… that sort of thing – oh, don’t look at me like that, Rose. I would never mess with the sanctity of the beautiful game.”

“Sounds like you’re trying to murder the beautiful game,” I grinned.

“You’ll love it,” George shook his head. “It’ll be forbidden in real matches, of course, we’ve thought it all through. Use them in training, and it’ll improve all sorts of reflexes you didn’t even know you had, that kind of thing. Get your flying-phobic friends up into the air on a Saturday afternoon. Convince Granny to get on a broom for family five-a-side.” You never knew with Uncle George whether it was ‘we’, he and Dad, or whether it was really more like ‘we’, he and Fred. Mum had told me that it had taken him so long to even recognise his brother’s death, that he had continued to talk in plural pronouns for five years, as if Fred just hadn’t made it down for dinner.

“Yeah, but is it educational enough for McGonagall?” Al asked.

“Oh, dear old Minerva,” George grinned. “She’ll definitely take it. Anything I do is good enough for her, because she didn’t expect me to do anything at all. Fred always used to say we exceeded expectations just for turning up to exams.”

I grinned. “My kind of attitude.”

“Shut up, Rose. You actually slept in the library during OWLs,” Al reminded me.

“You shut up,” I retorted. “You were so neurotic about OWLs that you colour-coded your food to match your revision notes, so you could revise during meals.”

“Well it worked,” he replied smugly, somehow managing to recall without using any words to that effect that Al had managed a full string of Os, while I’d been stuck with an E in Divination.

“Anyway, have a look around, see if anything takes your fancy, yeah, Rose?” Uncle George invited. “I’ll be in the shop, but I’ll probably still be on the stairs, I’m not taking on those crowds.”

“Thank you!” I exclaimed. I’d definitely be able to find James a present in the Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes new stock.

Uncle George did this weird kind of military salute, and left the warehouse for the main shop.

“So d’you think he’ll like a vanishing robes or the randomly shrinking quaffle more?” I asked Al, who clearly didn’t care what I bought his older brother, as long as there was a pair of Cannons robes in Madam Malkin’s when we got out of here. I wouldn’t normally put this much time and effort into anyone’s gift, _least_ of all the eldest Potter kid, but Uncle Harry and Auntie Ginny were looking like they’d have to adopt me any day now, so I figured I should try and be kind to their son, in case everything went tits up and he became my brother. I was still working on this theory, but with the looks my parents were giving each other (and me, when they thought I wasn’t looking), and the advances in modern magic, murdering stares didn’t seem too far off the cards. Of course, this would leave Hugh and I as orphans, and I knew that mum had specifically requested that Harry looked after us in her will; she didn’t completely trust anyone else. Or, at least, she, Dad and Uncle Harry had the whole trust thing absolutely locked down, which you probably would have to if you blindly followed someone on a mission to kill the most dangerous man in the world, with no plan, no qualifications and no adults.

“Vanishing robes are ever so slightly more likely to get him laid,” Al decided.

“Are you saying that a quaffle that sometimes becomes really small for no reason wouldn’t pull?” I replied sarcastically.

“I don’t know, Rose, you’re the girl,” Al replied. “What would get your attention?”

I silenced a voice in my head that was trying to dredge up a memory of white blonde hair falling into my face _._ “Probably not the shrinking quaffles,” I admitted. “You know what they say about a man with a small quaffles.”

“Don’t bother enlightening me,” Al replied.

I picked up a box of vanishing robes, and headed for the checkout in the main shop.

The crowds had died down a little, and it only took me half an hour of queuing to pay for my stuff. Uncle George and his family privileges seemed to be nowhere to be found, and the only people on the tills seemed to have conveniently forgotten that twenty five percent of this shop was literally signed over to me in Dad’s will. Another five minutes of pushing past customers to the door, and Al and I were finally out in the cold again, the heavy clouds ominously threatening snow. The thought of snow was lovely in front of the Common Room fire, and even better with the possibility of a Weasley snowball fight, but out here in Diagon Alley, without a coat because we’d floo-ed, the thought of snow was disgusting. 

“Weather’s getting worse,” Al said gloomily. “And I still haven’t bought the wool to knit Molly and Lucy those matching cardigans.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as far as I'm concerned they took that charm off the girls' dormitories a long time ago and besides, I'm not getting involved with jkr's bad gender politics, all rooms in hogwarts are available to all students xx
> 
> and also it turns out harry and ginny steal every scene that they're in no matter how small, what can u do


	3. Festive Scenes

I was washing up the big casserole dish, for want of something to do, when James burst into the kitchen, an orange Cannons hat jammed over his messy hair. You would really have thought his favourite team would be the Harpies. “Snowball fight, Granger?”

I glanced out of the window. I hadn’t even noticed the snow. It had settled in a thick layer over the whole garden, piled high on the table outside and the windowsills. There was something magical about it, in the most ordinary sense of the word.

I shrugged. “Yeah, alright. Let me just put a coat on.”

“Coats are for the weak!” James declared. I ignored him, not wanting a horrible, snotty cold on Christmas day; I was already basically guaranteed to be throwing up my lunch.

I left the kitchen and found my waterproof jacket under the stairs. I pulled it over my pink Weasley sweater (aesthetically, this was a lot on the eyes, with my hair and all), and stuffed my feet into a pair of boots. James had already rushed outside, with Dom and Lily hot on his heels.

I hurried outside after them, bumping into Fred as he careered into the house looking for a jacket – only to be smacked with a handful of snow.

James was grinning in satisfaction, the smug face of a perpetrator. I glared, shaking my head to get rid of the wet slush, and began to construct a sphere of snow. I raised my arm to throw it, but at the last second James ducked out of the way, and I hit Dom square in the chest.

“You _bitch_!” she cried, and being far more scared of an angry Dom than an overexcited James, I dashed out of the way, behind a tall bush.

Impressed with my hiding place, I crouched down to see under the bush, keeping an eye on everyone else, and let my guard down for a moment. That was when I felt the cold water trickling down the back of my neck.

I whipped round. Al was grinning, thrilled with himself.

“ _Wanker_!” I exclaimed, jumping up and kicking snow up at him feebly. “That was horrible! Oh, it’s so cold!”

“Yeah, well, it’s less than zero degrees, that’s the idea,” Al smirked.

“Fuck you, Potter!” I replied, gathering a handful of snow. “You are _so_ going to pay for that!” He’d already dashed off.

I chased after him round the hedge, and came directly into the firing line as Fred was throwing a large snowball at Lily.

I squealed, but I was really desperate to get Al back for my ice bath, so I let Fred be, for the time being. I was blindly running after him but, knowing my luck, he was probably under his dad’s cloak. I found myself in the orchard that the bottom of Nana and Granddad’s garden became. They had no idea when it had found its way inside their boundaries, but these days there was half a magical forest on the wrong side of their back fence. I stopped and glanced around. I had such a disadvantage with my hair; it was practically glowing against our cool surroundings. There was a rustle of leaves ahead of me, and I raised a snowball to my ear, narrowing my eyes. I thought I saw the flash of a hand, and I threw the snowball at my target.

It sailed through the air, and splashed onto an invisible lump where it disintegrated. Al’s head appeared as the cloak slipped off, his face flushed from the cold.

“Are you _kidding_ me? I was literally invisible!” he exclaimed.

I smirked. “Payback, Potter.”

Al glared. “I stood in the queue at the shop for half an hour while you bought a present for my _brother_ and this is what I get?”

“You dropped snow down my neck!” I exclaimed. “Of course that’s what you get!”

“You were an easy target,” he grinned.

“Fuck off,” I replied, half teasing. There were a good few feet between us; we were both scared that any sudden movements, and the other would strike. I realised that I was going to have to make a very quick exit in a moment, to avoid this possibility.

While I was concentrating on what I would do if Al _did_ throw another snowball, a new one sped past my ear from behind and smashed into Al’s fact, breaking against his nose. I whipped round in confusion. “Where did that come from?”

Al had stumbled a bit from the force of the snowball, which made me smile a little, until one of similar momentum smacked into the back of my head and I was propelled forwards a couple of steps. I was momentarily stunned, and then my brain suddenly switched on. “Magic. They’re enchanted. That’s your fucking brother.”

It disproportionately infuriated me when people used magic for everyday tasks, for the sole reason that it was still a week and a half before I could, and until then, it felt like James was cheating. Al had pulled out his wand, and was forming perfectly round snowballs swiftly, muttering the charms under his breath. I still wasn’t sure if he was an ally or not, so I was keeping my distance warily, willing January 3rd to appear around the corner and grant me permission to use my wand. Would I go to prison for a magic snowball? Would I have to give birth in Azkaban?

“Rose, duck,” Al warned, and I sidestepped just in time for a violent snowball to whizz out of the forest. We both fell silent to listen, and Al made a triumphant noise when we heard it hit its mark: a thick, red sweater that read ‘my dad is Harry Potter’, all the funnier in James’ eyes because he’d seen it in a charity shop window in Diagon Alley, with a label from a clothes shop that had closed about six years before he was born. Al and James were constantly amused by the adoration other people held for their dad, but to be fair, if someone disposed of Isla Nott, I’d probably hold a party, so I couldn’t even begin to imagine how overwhelmingly brilliant it would have been for Uncle Harry to kill Voldemort.

I’d become distracted, and when I snapped back into reality, I realised that Al had exhausted his supply of magically offensive snowballs. “I’m going to start running,” he was saying. “I’d advise you to do the same thing.”

I rolled my eyes, thinking that was far too dramatic for a harmless snowball fight – I never ran at Hogwarts, I walked dignifiedly up the stairs and pushed the snow from one of the windowsills in the Gryffindor Common Room onto James’ head – but then I spotted the wall of snow that was closing in on us, and it suddenly felt like the best course of action. I turned on my heels and sprinted out of the way.

James had won the snowball fight. I wasn’t sure how he’d come to that conclusion, but he was still out there celebrating, so he was definitely eligible for the ‘most intense participator’ award. I was watching him from the kitchen window in amusement, a scratchy blanket around my shoulders and a mug of Nana’s notorious hot chocolate in my hands, feeling like the real winner. The snow had stopped for a while (so it was easier to see that we’d decimated the garden), but the gloomy clouds overhead predicted a rematch tomorrow. There was a fire crackling in the corner of the kitchen and Uncle Bill was just building another one in the living room. Uncle Harry and Uncle George had got hold of about five thousand magical Christmas lights, strung from every beam, and they illuminated the whole house in a soft, yellow glow.

*

It was only a couple of days before Christmas. I had been helping Nana Molly peel vegetables. There were two motivations to this: one was that she was going to all the effort, it was the least I could do. The other was that she had murdered Bellatrix Lestrange, and with the atmosphere that hung over my parents these days, it didn’t hurt to have her on my side. It was becoming clear, not just to me, that I had been the catalyst for their legendary huge argument but now I was just another factor in it. They hardly spent any time in the same room, and they took it in turns to go home early and “feed the cat”; this kind of job would be a five-minute round apparition trip under usual circumstances, but whoever went home generally wouldn’t come back the same evening. More than once I had heard Uncle Harry remind family members of the time they hadn’t talked for months in third year, over a cat and a rat, or the time that they had had such a prolonged cold war in six year that Mum had attacked Dad with a flock of magical birds. Harry didn’t seem all that concerned – maybe even a little amused – but privately I thought this situation was quite different to the arguments I remembered from my childhood, like when Dad had accidentally left Hugo in a pub in Scotland after a Quidditch match and didn’t realise until he was almost home.

I flopped down onto the red, squashy sofa in the living room. Fred had the Christmas Quidditch tournament on the wireless, which meant James wasn’t far off. Al was upstairs wrapping presents, and Louis, Roxy and Molly had just begun a complicated looking game of cards, far superior to Exploding Snap but equally as likely to take your eyebrows off, as far as I could tell. Dom and Teddy were playing an intense game of wizard chess at the table, with Victoire occasionally advising whoever she glided past. I knew that Teddy was working really hard to win over Dom and Louis; he was considering asking Victoire to marry him, and he didn’t think they were quite ready to take him seriously. There were thick Weasley sweaters in every direction, reminding us of each other’s names (Molly, Lucy, Lil and I were mistaken for each other _all_ the time). I had heard some of my cousins complain about them in public, and I had considered docking points when I heard Hugo do it in the common room just before the end of term, but I, personally, was really looking forward to getting a new colour in a couple of days.

I picked up Mum’s old copy of _Pride and Prejudice_ but I wasn’t very far through the next chapter when Teddy called me over to play him. He’d wiped the board of Dom’s pieces.

“I’m not very good at chess,” I protested, sitting down opposite him.

“Rubbish,” he replied, setting up his pieces. “Your dad won fifty points in his first year for the best game of chess Hogwarts had ever seen.”

“That’s why it’s embarrassing that I’m not very good,” I explained.

“I’m not letting you win, if that’s what you’re after,” he warned. “Come on, you can start.” I instructed a pawn to venture out into the middle of the board, only to be seized by one of Teddy’s in two moves.

Soon, Teddy had five ivory pawns, a castle, a bishop and a knight in a small pile next to him. I glanced at the three measly pawns of his that I’d managed to take. My pieces were really cross with me; my remaining knight was now refusing to take my directions. “This is humiliating,” I groaned, over the sound of the Falmouth Falcons scoring another goal against Puddlemere United.

“Don’t be silly,” Teddy grinned. “Bishop to F5.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I grinned ruefully, as he took my second castle.

“Is that Puddlemere United?” Uncle Harry asked, wandering in and sitting down in a chair next to the wireless. “Is Oliver playing?”

James glanced up. “Yeah – he’s doing well.” He turned the wireless up a little louder with his wand. I rolled my eyes. Every time anyone had come into the room James had turned it up a little, and I was certain the whole of Ottery St. Catchpole could hear this match now.

I distractedly played a couple more moves, and then suddenly Teddy had me in check. I glanced down at the board and moved an offensive pawn out of the way of my King. It made noises of great indignation. “Congratulations.”

“You didn’t _try_ very hard,” Teddy replied.

“You were winning before I sat down,” I grinned.

*

Lily and I were up almost all night on Christmas Eve. Auntie Ginny had insisted that we spend the night with them, like we always had – the whole thing about Uncle Harry receiving tissues for Christmas presents before becoming friends with Dad. Mum had barely said three words to me during last whole week, but somehow, she had silently organised everything so that the four of us turned up at Grimmauld Place with bright smiles and sacks of presents. Uncle Harry had taken us all out to muggle London to hear the carols, and Mum had briefly tried to explain what it all meant to muggle Christians. The lesson didn’t last long, but it was a different kind of thrill to hear their voices rise through the streets, a kind of magic I felt, even if I didn’t understand it. We’d eaten well in the stone kitchen that I’d made so many of my earliest memories in, and we’d all spent hours playing board games, including a particularly heated round of _Harry Potter Monopoly_ (an extensive list of all the glamourous places he’d spent the first eighteen years of his life, including but not limited to the Quidditch World Cup tent, Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom and Madam Puddifoot’s). Dad and Harry fought tirelessly for the Gryffindor Common Room and then Dad accidentally punched Harry in the arm, and not long after we’d gone up to bed, we heard Harry exclaiming “I’m Harry fucking _Potter_ and I _want_ the Gryffindor Common Room!”

I’d slept on Lily’s floor, in amongst the mess of magazine articles, scraps of parchment and four things that she’d meant to take back to _Topshop_ (Lily wasn’t at all impressed by the idea of casual robes). We’d had a great time drinking the tiniest glasses of a very low-alcohol cider (a nasty hangover on Christmas Day would definitely sign my death warrant, and there was also the thing with the baby), gossiping (“so, I heard that Jessica Edgecombe is seeing that hot seventh year Hufflepuff, I’m actually so jealous”), bitching (“she kissed _him_? Merlin, I think even my standards are higher than that!”, “she’s a lovely person, but the moment she smells alcohol she just starts slagging everyone off – and it’s not even like she’s a lightweight, I’m sure it’s an excuse”) and sharing a select few secrets. In some ways it felt like the ideal moment to break the big one to Lily, and in other ways I could imagine her taking it very badly, hexing me and finding herself at a Ministry hearing for underage magic on Christmas Day, and I didn’t think I could do that to her parents. We’d fallen asleep at about three on Christmas morning, and someone had charmed the Grandfather clock to chime ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ as soon as it struck six, so neither of us felt particularly refreshed when it all kicked off.

The Potter living room was glowing from the reflection of gold wrapping paper. Uncle Harry was already in the kitchen making a pot of coffee, and he promised he’d wake everyone else up and then we were all crammed around the tree in various states of pyjama, immersed in chaos. There were nice presents going round – large boxes of sweets, practical, Hermione Granger-esque school materials, everything that James and Al could find commercially with their dad’s face on it. James got me a small collection of ‘X for Dummies’ books, where the joke was evidently that I was a dummy. I’d given Al a muggle mobile phone – I’d bought it on a whim, after overhearing a conversation between him and granddad about _apps_ and _video games_. My aunt and uncle had forcefully bestowed eighty galleons on me. I spent all day trying to give it back, but they weren’t having any of it, and I was a little relieved because I thought this might become the only money I had to my name when I inevitably had to run away and bring up the baby in some muggle community where none of the people who I’d let down would ever think to look for me. 

Uncle Harry cracked open the champagne and Auntie Ginny, Mum and Kreacher worked around one another to put together a feast of pancakes, eggs and sausages. James hardly let that settle before he had rushed outside to test his new Starsweeper broom, closely followed by Al and I for an impromptu game of Quidditch which lasted most of the morning. Even Hugo grudgingly borrowed James’ old broom and made a few decent saves.

*

Nana had insisted that everyone make it to Ottery St. Catchpole for twelve, an order which was obeyed to the letter because she was known to seriously penalise anyone who was late to a meal. Once we arrived, it transpired that she didn’t intend to serve lunch until three. She was pleased to have got us all there on time though – the exception to this rule was Uncle George, who turned up exactly when he wanted, and she always let him.

“Oh, Ron, darling!” Nana exclaimed, coming through from the kitchen to greet us, a wooden spoon in her hand. “Hello, Hermione, dear. Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas, Rose!”

“Merry Christmas, Molly,” Mum smiled. “Where’s Hugo got to – I’m sure I saw him a second ago. Rose, go and see if your Nana needs any help, love.”

I hadn’t heard any sort of endearment directed at me in almost two weeks and I took it to be a promising sign. Keen to further curry favour, I was headed straight to the kitchen when I was intercepted by Teddy, who was sporting bright red, Weasley hair for the occasion, and a gift box. Uncle Harry had all but forced him to spend Christmas Eve at Grimmauld Place, but Teddy had wanted to be as close to his parents as possible, and Harry could hardly dispute that.

“Merry Christmas, Rosie!” he beamed.

“Merry Christmas!” I exclaimed, pulling him into a hug. “Is that for me?”

“Wait – you were expecting presents?” he asked slowly, his eyes dancing.

I grinned. “Good thing I didn’t get you one, then.”

“You _didn’t get me a present_?” he repeated. “Doesn’t sixteen years of friendship mean _anything_ to you, Weasley?”

I laughed, and he finally handed over the scarlet gift box. It was wrapped in Gryffindor colours and I had done the same for his, black and yellow – Teddy had been a Hufflepuff like his mother; he was a little bit too kind of his own good. I untied the ribbon and found mine and his faces beaming up at me inside the box, laughing, a picture I remembered from the 2022 Quidditch World Cup: France vs. USA (we’d all stayed at the Delacour Family Guest House. Dom’s grandparents were so excited to be in the final. America won unexpectedly, when France had had a more than one-hundred-point lead, 430 – 390. Uncle George had predicted it before we even left. The match lasted for about four hours, and then everyone went back and drank hideously strong French liquor for the rest of the night). I looked up and grinned broadly at Teddy. “Oh, I love it! We look so happy.”

“I looked for that photo for ages,” he replied proudly. “Your Uncle Percy had it – god knows why.”

I passed over my gifts to him in return. Two books had just been published about the war and I thought they might have a bit more information about his parents than he already knew – even Uncle Harry fell short of being able to explain quite what his father had done in the years when they hadn’t kept in regular contact, and his mother had certainly kept the more hair-raising details of her job from her own mother. I’d gone through the books quickly, and highlighted in gold any information about his parents. Their stories ended with the usual line about heroism and tragedy, but it was well written, I thought it might make him feel proud. Inside the first book I’d spellotaped a small photo of the whole Weasley-Potter-Lupin affair.

Teddy was looking a bit stunned, but he produced a genuine, “thank you, Rose. These are… it’s great, thank you.”

I didn’t know what it was like to not have parents on Christmas Day, so I said tactfully, “you’re welcome. I think I said I’d help Nana with the potatoes or something, so I’ll see you in a bit, yeah?”

Dad and Uncle Charlie were already opening the fourth bottle of champagne I’d seen that day, and Nana was hurrying around, flapping a tea towel in all directions, looking a little harassed. Christmas Day was her personal challenge, and every year was an attempt to outdo the last. She refused help staunchly, as if that would lessen her success, and I was only in the kitchen for a couple of minutes before I felt I was in the way. It wasn’t until Uncle George arrived at almost two o’clock that she took twenty minutes off from guarding the dinner to exchange gifts. This passed in a blur of wrapping paper. Dom tied a gold ribbon into my hair at one point, and I got a painful paper cut from Uncle George’s gift (I wondered idly whether he’d charmed the paper). There was one moment when Molly’s wrapping paper caught fire, and it looked like the whole wooden house might go up in flames, along with all of Grandad’s will to live, but mum was straight in there with a swift _aguamenti_ (I’m not thoroughly convinced that it was an accident that she sprayed water in Molly’s eye). The whole thing was interrupted by a knock at the door and Nana hurried out of the room to greet Teddy’s grandmother. He was up like a shot to follow Nana – it seemed like he hadn’t spent Christmas morning with Andromeda like I’d assumed. I could hardly stand to think about it. 

Nana and Andromeda had always got on well. She was a no-nonsense kind of woman, and where Auntie Fleur, Auntie Audrey and Auntie Angelina had all failed, she managed to force her help on Nana. Dinner was ready by ten to three.

Squeezing the Weasley’s round a table was like a really complicated game of chess. I squashed in between Dom and Al, opposite Uncle Bill, who seemed like miles away across such a huge table. I pulled wizard crackers with Dom and Al, with their usual loud bangs. I lost both but stole a rogue, yellow paper hat from the floor. Down the table, Fred had donned a particularly impressive army helmet from his. We were briefly enveloped in the standard blue smoke, and glitter seemed to rain down onto the table for most of the afternoon as a consequence. Uncle George was in his element; he had spent the year collecting shit cracker jokes, and he was telling them loudly to anyone who would listen.

There was no easy way to serve twenty-seven people, so Nana was accustomed to levitating bowls of food around the table with her wand. In front of Granddad was an enormous, magically enhanced, I suspected, golden brown turkey which he was carving with relish. The room was filled with the loud buzz of conversation. James, Fred and Al were planning pranks to their hearts content, for our return to Hogwarts; the stock room of _Weasleys Wizard Wheezes_ had been generously distributed into their stockings. Lily, Auntie Fleur and Auntie Angelina were engaged in an animated conversation about the Harpies match that Lily had tickets to see in the New Year. Harry, Teddy and Andromeda were having a quieter discussion – throughout it, Harry’s expression seemed to be purely of longing; I suspected they were sharing stories of a different family over Christmas. There was no one left in the world who could tell Harry what his first Christmas with his parents had been like, and Teddy hadn’t even had that. Nana was surveying the table proudly, and deservedly so. A small army of house elves could hardly have done better cooking on this scale. I chatted to Dom about the perfume that Vaisey had sent her, and to Auntie Ginny about the scale of the meal, and how Nana never failed to impress everyone.

Once Granddad had cleared his plate for the fourth time, we mostly retreated to the living room, drawn in by the thought of quiet board games and the Minister’s speech on the wireless. Uncle Harry was telling Angelina in amusement about the time that Rufus Scrimgeour had turned up to recruit him, during the Christmas of his sixth year. The snow had started to fall again. Mum had already fallen asleep, her head dropping sideways onto Dad’s shoulder. Vic and Teddy had disappeared up the stairs. A game of Quidditch had half-heartedly been proposed, but everyone was too full and too tipsy to face sitting a broom – if James added his huge ego to the mix, even his new Starsweeper wouldn’t make it off the ground. I sat by the fire, playing a vicious game of exploding snap with Roxy and Lucy, and I thought there _must_ be a higher power keeping an eye on me when I realised that I’d kept all of my meals down all day.


End file.
